


songs of innocence

by orphan_account



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: (just covering my bases), Ableism, Ableist Language, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Gen, Internalised ableism, Misgendering, Trans Male Character, as befits a series about a hella cannibal, probably everyone is trans, shit hits the fan so hard it goes sailing into the stratosphere, the high school au from heck, will is trans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-22
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-16 14:21:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1350568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Always the new boy at school, always the stranger, Will Graham is used to being dragged across state lines by his father. But when he's brought to a sleepy lakeside town in Virginia, he's confronted with more than his own fears: he's stumbled upon terrible secrets that are just beginning to take root in his new home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. in the shadow of the oak

“O dear white children casual as birds,  
Playing among the ruined languages,  
So small beside their large confusing words,  
So gay against the greater silences  
Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head,  
Impetuous child with the tremendous brain,  
O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain,  
Lost innocence who wished your lover dead,  
Weep for the lives your wishes never led.”  
  
— from “Anthem for St. Cecilia’s Day,” _W.H. Auden_

  


The night was singing its quiet song.

It was the song of the sugar maples whispering their dry rain outside his bedroom window, of the old house comfortably creaking like a dinghy lapped by waves, of owls calling softly to each other from their hiding places. With his fingers fluttering contentedly over his heart, Will Graham shut his eyes and listened to his slow, peaty breaths in the dark. Sometimes, if he laid very still in bed like this, he could imagine the world sluicing away in a flash flood. Waters rising silently in his mind to pluck doors from hinges, roots from dirt, even the mattress from underneath him. It’d all... just fall away. And he’d be right in the middle of it, Plato’s Earth in the churning whirlpool of outlying planets, the sun, the moon. Nothing could touch him.

A strange sense of clarity washed over him. 

_Untouchable._

His mouth moved to silently form the word over and over. 

Savouring the taste of it, Will rolled onto his side and fitted his cheek into the soft angle of his elbow. That’d be nice, he thought drowsily. Sleep had begun to creep over him in a warm, welcome fog, refracting his thoughts to the year before, to all the things he was _trying_ to not be touched by.

His father had moved them up here last summer for work, following the forks of rivers and the crumbling shores of lakes like a hungry heron. Will followed _him_ , chased him up and down greasy, briny boatyards, not out of any great love for the old man, but because he was only fifteen and didn’t have much say in the matter. Fifteen and penniless. Fifteen and _less_ a lot of things. Motherless. Friendless. Even after a year at his new school Will was still feeling like a jigsaw piece jammed against all the wrong edges of its puzzle. 

Was it always going to be like that? He was afraid it was. He was afraid there was this look to him, this smell, like a dying animal in the herd, that drove the others away and drew out the predators. Skittish and small for his age, he’d dealt with the latter all his life.

But what if he could change that? What if he could take the entire damn puzzle apart in his hands? He’d remake it then. Here, in his head, no one at school would mock his feeble, halting steps toward conversation. Under his fingers a piece slotted into place with a soft click. No one would whistle and snap in his face like he was a stray dog, trying to force him to meet their gaze. Another piece joined the first. Their eyes and voices almost hurt. His hands trembled in his mind and against the pillow as he hurried to complete the puzzle. He’d make it stop. He didn’t want to look anymore. 

What I want, he thought, as his head dipped and jerked in tired, minute motions, is to be a tiny ball of rock suspended in space. Everyone else would be a cluster of distant stars, so far away their pinpricks of light would never, ever reach him.

_That’d be..._

His head dipped once more and stopped moving.

*

It was silent.

Damp with sweat, Will awoke to find himself already sitting up. He was breathing so hard he thought his lungs might come loose. For a few moments he didn’t know where he was. It made his heart leap wildly into his throat to see the strange room closing in on him. The furniture was all wrong, somehow, the window should be on the opposite wall—

Like an ephemeral lake after spring, the haze of panic evaporated as quickly as it had come. 

This was home. 

Or, at the very least, just a place where he lived. For now, Will thought with a well-worn bitterness. Until one day, out of the blue, his father would decide to pick them up again and drop them at random on one of those big political maps of the USA. He begrudgingly peeled off his wet camisole and flung it at the floor as if it were the true object of his resentment. It was difficult to make anything feel like home when you lived like that, floating through life like dandelion fluff at the mercy of the wind. Will had had to learn the hard way to not get too attached to much of anything anymore. All he could do was perpetually shrink in on himself, bracing for everything to change when he least expected it.

Will put on a dry shirt, sagged back onto his lumpy mattress, and dug the heels of his palms into his eyes until colours exploded behind the lids in hazy stars. He had no memory of falling asleep, nor the dreams that sweated out of him and made him twist the sheets all around his legs. But something _was_ wrong. The air was different. Thicker somehow, charged with an electricity that thrummed through his body and made the soft hairs of his arms lift up. Will was reminded of an old TV set they’d had when he was younger. The high-pitched ringing it constantly emitted, even when it was off, until he could _feel it_ rather than hear it. Feel it vibrating through the vermin-infested walls and floorboards, as if it were alive and reaching for him. Even when he finally ripped the power cord out of the wall he swore it was still there inside his head. 

There was something inside his head right now. Noise jolted him back into the present. 

It sounded like the screen door downstairs slamming against its frame, so quick it might have been only the wind. Holding his breath, he peered around the room slowly, taking it all in. It seemed like just about everything here had a voice, and they were all vying for his attention tonight. So he listened. His ears strained against the muffled darkness toward it. He waited for it to return. _Willed_ it to return. Yet there was nothing but the quickening drum of his own heartbeat. He was thinking he had imagined the whole thing when it happened again. Louder than before. His breath escaped him in a rush.

Will was starting to want it to be the wind. The alternative was that it was the all too familiar plodding of footsteps across the porch, creaking over the rotting wood of the front steps. A person, not an animal, he was sure of that. He had a bad habit of feeding semi-feral dogs wherever he went, a half-eaten sandwich or drumstick saved in a napkin here and there, which explained the pinched, chronically underfed look he always had about him. Sometimes they sat out in the driveway, great droves of them howling all night, until his father ran out in his boxers and an air gun to chase them off. No, Will would recognise the scrabbling of their little paws anywhere; this was not one of his dogs

But a subtle pressure was nudging him to act, nudging him from off the top of the rumpled covers and over to the curtains that stirred in the warm, sticky air like lace-trimmed ghosts. There was a little fingernail of moon outside his window, and below it the weak light formed a silvered path that cut across the long dirt driveway and overgrown shrubs. But there was no one—or nothing, a flat voice in his head unhelpfully interjected—there. That it might not even be human gave him little comfort, and Will wasn’t even particularly superstitious. Tonight there’d be no easy sleep then, not until he investigated the sound. He didn’t know why but he was so sure of it. 

Frowning, he padded back to his bed and reached under its exposed frame, feeling around clumps of dust and balled up paper until his fingers met his raggedy slippers. They were a size or two too small now, the backs of them flat where he’d squashed them down over the years with his heels, and he did so again as he toed them on. Then he grabbed his robe, this time a size or two too big—one of his father’s hand-me-downs—and finally fetched a flashlight from the nightstand. Feeling satisfactorily equipped, he headed downstairs, carefully avoiding the places on the steps he had long discovered squeaked in protest. The last thing he needed was to get caught by his father in the middle of the night. He didn’t feel like explaining himself to anyone, not now, or else he’d lose what little courage he had. 

It was only at the bottom of the staircase that Will realised he had forgotten his glasses. He swore under his breath and turned, staring back at stairs that had grown in the dark and shifted into a foreboding chasm. Darkness had a way of ramping up his terrible imagination. Thoughts would often come to him like an unbidden guest. He saw himself move toward that yawning blackness in slow motion, pale and tiny in his mind’s eye, and the shadows swallowed him up. Will flinched away uneasily and clutched his flashlight tighter. He tried to clear away his guests, shaking his head lightly, but it was about as useful as emptying a bucket underwater. So he crept out onto the porch, following the path cut by the moon until the light eventually died away.

Despite the muggy summer evening, little gnats and mosquitoes buffeting the air, it felt like he had waded into a cold pool of water instead. The chill that rose slowly throughout the body, first bringing out rows of goosebumps, then an insidious numbness. Somehow he knew he wasn’t alone, but there was no tell-tale snuffling of the wild dogs around him as he walked.

Will turned his flashlight on and off just to have something to do with his bloodless hands, and unexpectedly the brush to his right crackled in response. He was not scared. He said the words to himself, and he knew he didn’t believe them, because the fear was already inside him, tingling up his spine, spreading across both shoulders. He didn’t have words for what he really was. Possessed, maybe. Or crazy? He’d heard that word a lot nowadays, and others too. Insane. Spazz. Words that were needle thin yet pinned him open like a frog on a dissection tray. He ran his hand over his stomach and could almost see the organs shining wetly at him. He wasn’t sure he believed _those_ words, but then why did he feel this way, why did he see these things....

The noises of the night grew until they were spinning, huge and muddled, all around him. His feet no longer touched the ground. The darkness seemed to growl a warning at him like rolling thunder, and Will floated unseeing toward the danger, caught in its inexorable pull, pushing easily past the thick growths of branches and spiderwebs that caught on his face and hair.

It brought him into a clearing with an oak in the middle of it. The tree was huge, gnarled and growing too close to the ground so that its long branches strained out toward some mysterious force. It looked like it was trying to escape the sun. Will had come here often when he first moved in, sitting in its sinking arms with a little knife. He still remembered the jagged words and old names he had carved into the wood and exactly where to find them. He was trying to escape something, too.

Under the oak was a strange shadow.

Will trained his light on the shape and it started the high-pitched TV ringing in his head.

Lying curled up on its side amongst the branches was the broken, nude body of a man. His skin looked dark, but that was only layers upon layers of dirt and dusky bruises. How was it that someone could die out here, alone and afraid in the scrubs, and no one noticed? A part of Will, strange and distant, wondered how long the corpse had been there. Some of the blood looked almost... _wet._ With a gurgling moan, the corpse weakly lifted his head and looked straight at him. The retinas glowed red in the light, capturing him like an insect in a bead of amber. He dropped his flashlight with a gasp. In a split second fire had ripped through him and greedily sucked the oxygen from his lungs. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. His brain was screaming.

_The man was alive._

“H...elp...” That awful gurgling moan again. “Me....”

Will felt his legs trembling but they refused to collapse under him. Instead they began to move of their own accord. He looked down at his feet in horror but couldn’t make himself stop. He could only stumble closer as the bloodied man loomed in his vision. There was nowhere else to look.

“I don’t know what to do,” whispered Will, shaking his head until it hurt and shaking it even then. Something wet was on his face and he realised belatedly that he was crying. “Please, I don’t know....”

“Should I... leave?” he tried, his voice barely audible now, thick with tears. “To go get help? Should I leave you?”

He stared uncomprehending into the man’s face, avoiding his eyes, and the man unsteadily lifted a filthy hand, pointing back where he had come from. 

_Go._

Not wasting another moment, Will snatched up his fallen flashlight, turned and raced back to the house. He was like a wild animal, crashing through bushes and twigs. His slipper caught on a root, tore off, and disappeared into the night. But he didn’t stop running. Couldn’t stop running. The TV was ringing in his head and his organs were spilling out onto his knees and the shadows were opening up to him like night-blooming flowers. Hot tears blurred his vision and stung his cheeks as he ran on and on, chanting _please be okay_ under his breath. He wasn’t sure if the words were for the wounded man or himself.

He should’ve called the police. Will was inside his house now, ripping through cupboards for towels and, stupidly, the first aid kit. Some childish memory bubbling frantically to the surface in his panic, reminding him to disinfect cuts and stick a cute Band-Aid on. Calling the police would’ve been the right thing to do but nothing felt right anymore. What he had seen out there was beyond right and wrong; it felt _evil._ He could see himself peeling away a beige bandage and stretching the tiny thing over a gaping wound in the man’s side. It fell in. His fingers slipped after it. He was crying and couldn’t hear himself. He couldn’t hear anything. He looked around helplessly for a moment before pulling his robe off and dumping everything into it, pulling it into a clumsy sack. 

He should’ve woken his father up or picked up the phone, but he did neither of those things.

Yellow pendulums of light slashed into the ground as Will ran, flashlight in one hand and the sack clutched in the other. Dread was rising like a bubble of vomit in his esophagus. The body would be gone. Even before he came into the clearing he knew, stumbling as he was struck with the sudden revelation. Will didn’t understand how, but he knew it would be empty. He felt a coldness growing in his stomach.

“There’s something wrong with me,” he said into the darkness. There was no reply. Just the wind stirring the old oak’s crown and his long curly hair. 

He circled the wide trunk, finding splashes of dark blood in the dirt and yellowing tufts of grass. For a moment he thought he could follow them and track the man, like he’d seen hunters or bloodhounds do on television. But the blood stains were few and far between, and after wandering in circles for several minutes he realised he couldn’t tell the difference between what was coming or going. He’d spent his not too distant childhood catching fish, not traipsing through forests after wounded deers. 

Defeated, he trudged through the undergrowth, suddenly exhausted. The spell was broken. In a gentle stream, sound had slowly trickled back into the scrubs and washed over him. 

Up ahead his little house glowed in the moon-and-starlight like a beacon.

Instead of going back to bed Will wearily pulled up a lawn chair on the porch, too tired and numb to try to be quiet anymore. He draped the biggest, thickest towel around his shoulders like a cloak and layered the others in his lap. He clicked off his light, looking up at the sky. He waited for the man to return. _Willed_ him to return. 

“H...elp... me....” The voice bubbled in his ear, so close he shivered, had to close his eyes against it.

Suddenly Will saw the man, not before him with his own eyes, but as if he had stepped inside the man's skin like he’d put on a coat. Will Graham had disappeared. In his place was a naked body, covered in a patina of his own blood and filth, stumbling through the dry brush. His pulse boomed like thunder, and with every beat, he could feel the heat of his blood gushing out of his wounds. The perspective was yanked back. He saw himself—no, it wasn’t him anymore, it was just the man, running for his life, Will at his heels like a slavering hound. His mouth fell open, teeth exposed in a mirthless grin. He was enjoying himself.

He fell asleep like that, smiling softly.

*

The sun appeared in a white ribbon over the horizon. It peeked through the woods, like the whites of a thousand eyes staring unblinkingly. Under their concentrated gaze, Will slowly stirred in his seat. It must have been a bad dream, he thought, rubbing his knuckles into his sticky eyes and peering groggily down the driveway. Just a bad dream, like the one that had woken him up in the middle of the night. The kind of dream that left only the lingering impression of fear on you.

Before he went to the front door he glanced behind himself one last time. 

Blood faintly streaked the porch.


	2. the hunter

It was a pleasure to hunt.

It was a pleasure to watch fear seize a body in its vise; pupils dilate as adrenaline began to flood; sweat cover the skin like a sheen of oil on water. To capture that life in your hands like a little bird and feel it flutter, knowing how easily you could destroy it in the cage of your fingers, was an intoxicating power. One moment you would see a starburst of life in their eyes. In the next, close that same hand around the bird, and the light would be extinguished. He had tasted of it and couldn’t stop himself. Didn’t want to. He was only getting started.

And who could stop a hunter?

In the lonely clearing of brush, Will stood shivering in spite of himself with his flashlight off. For the moment he didn’t need it. Overhead the moon swelled like ripening fruit, its bright light casting a stunted shadow before him. He lifted his hand slowly, watching his shadow self do the same. He waved and the shadow waved back. Letting out a deep breath, Will sagged down to the dirt, pulling his knees in and resting his chin between their bony hillocks. He’d spent so long in someone else’s head he had to make sure that it was him looking back now. Not a hunted, bloodied man running through the woods. Not his hunter either, with the face all obscured to Will like a thin mask of skin, its eyes hollow and the mouth sealed. In front of him his shadow had stretched into something unfamiliar and shapeless. Something not human at all. 

Caught in a gossamer web of his own denial and fear, Will was plagued by that nightmare of discovering the man under the oak tree. It seemed to take on a life of its own, to gather itself into a massive, almost corporeal body so that it could slip just out of sight whenever he approached. Around every corner it felt as if someone laid there waiting for him, and yet, as he slowly rounded the walls with his breath coming thickly, no one was ever there. There where times he walked into an empty room to find it faintly warm just where he came to a stop, as if a person had passed through only moments before. In his nose and on his tongue was the copper tang of blood that he couldn’t get rid of. 

None of what he had seen was real because he didn’t _want_ it to be real. Will didn’t want the film of wrongness perpetually coating his hands and face, impervious to soap and scalding water. He had tried to bury the memory more than once, digging deep and long inside himself until he struck clay and rocks, but that far down he brought too many ugly things squirming into the light, and he couldn’t bear to look at those either. So he walled it off instead, sealed it in a little fort of his making. He kept his head down. He didn’t tell anyone, though he wasn’t sure who he could tell and who would believe him. But the memory was like a wound that wouldn't clot. The blood soaked through his fort as easily as if it were made from paper. It came to pool around his feet, splashing his ankles whenever he moved. 

And when Will climbed into bed one night, tumbling into the cumulus of his pillows and hoping just this once for a long dreamless sleep, a pained wet noise rattled through the air. He froze, still twisted on one side, hand uselessly clutching the edge of his blanket. His eyes flew to the ceiling and remained fixed there. He refused to look anywhere else. Even above the roar of his own blood rushing in his ears he still heard the gurgling. The man was blurry in the edges of his vision, patches of his skin black with blood. He didn’t call out for help like he had that first night. He didn’t do anything. Blotted with blood and shadows, he only stood there in the darkness swaying unsteadily. Breathing. 

Will had come to the clearing every night since with the vain hope of somehow exorcising those thoughts. 

A familiar quiet snuffling reached out to him warmly from the stunted trees. Immediately Will started to breathe easier, expectantly holding his hand out until a furred head bumped hard into his palm. He shut his eyes and allowed himself a little smile as he pressed his fingers against a dip between eyes and the broad curve of skull. 

“Hey, is that you, Molly?” he asked quietly, turning to the dog and contently squeezing her warm face between both hands. 

Molly barked happily and ran a tight circle around him, pale retina twinkling in and out of the darkness. He buried his fingers deeper into the greasy fur at her neck and held her close, breathing in the smell of wet earth and dog. The night pressed in even closer with its sounds. 

“I’m glad you’re here.” 

*

Two hundred miles away, in an austere house of neat grey brick, Ivan Zaharoff was cutting into one of the finest pieces of _buzhenina_ he’d ever eaten. All around him Hannibal Lecter’s dining room was stained the deepest colours of the night sky. The dark, glistening head of the pig was set in the middle of the table, dressed in fruits, pale amaryllis and lily, thinly sliced flesh mimicking their shapes, while the choicest bits of its anatomy—the sweetbreads, the joints, the liver—were placed about it in small circles as if frozen in orbit.

“You’ve truly outdone yourself, doctor,” Zaharoff simpered graciously, lifting another morsel of ham into his mouth. 

If the flavour of the meat was somewhat unfamiliar, he said nothing, though there were few animals Zaharoff had not eaten, most of which he had killed with his own two hands. His respect for Lecter was tremendous, borderline devout. The doctor was several years younger than Zaharoff, but possessed such wisdom and epicurean taste that he couldn’t help but defer to him in almost all things in their time together. Lecter appeared to him unlined and yet ageless, as if he wore a mask. His flat face held the smooth, unnatural elegance and aloofness of a Mannerist painting; he was art imitating art instead of life. What his real face looked like beneath that mask he could not imagine, though he hoped to see it…. 

“Please, it’s always a pleasure to cook for others,” said Dr. Lecter with a wave of his hand. “Allows me to escape the rituals of boredom in preparing and eating for one.” 

They shared a quiet laugh and lifted their lead crystal glasses to one another. 

“Did you know that my ancestors were said to be shamans?” Zaharoff spoke in a perpetually wet, ingratiating way. Like a dog craving its cruel master’s approval and yet always expecting a boot to the ribs. He did not yet know what sort of master the doctor was. “I understand they were of the belief that feasting upon the flesh of an animal allowed one to… absorb some of its qualities. I wonder what this hog will imbue in us tonight.” 

“I hope not much. He was not a very smart pig,” Dr. Lecter replied, smiling gently into his wine. 

Zaharoff suddenly saw a shrieking pig led to the slaughter. 

In his mind’s eye the struggling pig transformed into a nude man. A far away expression stole across his face as he remembered. Remembered the way his jewelled dagger, sharpened so finely, had slipped between a man’s rib cage like it was warmed butter. Remembered the blood slicking his hands and drying to tack. He had released his prey into the dark woods of Virginia, stripped of his clothes and armed only with a knife, and caught him easily just hours later. In the end, the chase proved disappointing. He had found the man clinging to his last breaths under an oak tree. Zaharoff could not consume him then, for fear of partaking in his weakness. 

“Something on your mind, Ivan?” 

Dr. Lecter watched him coolly from across the table, his mask only showing a hint of concern. Zaharoff thought himself a tiny ant under the eye of a god. His forehead began to perspire heavily and he mopped at it with a napkin. It was as if Lecter’s eyes were boring through his frontal bone, carving a little window for the young doctor to see into his very thoughts. Zaharoff would have entertained the notion of eating him but, no, he was unworthy of Lecter. 

“Ah, no, it’s nothing.” Twin spots of red burnt into Zaharoff’s cheeks. “As you know my father passed away a few months ago. I think of him often.” 

“I’ve been told the General was a great man. His presence will be sorely missed.” 

“And difficult to replace, if I’m honest.” 

“So you hope to become his replacement?" Lecter lifted a brow. "Rarely are sons similar to their fathers, Ivan. There’s no shame in that.” 

_Become him._ Dr. Lecter had no idea how close he was to touching the truth, and all he would need to do was stretch his arms out like wings to brush it. In that moment Zaharoff wanted very badly to tell him. He wanted to share the surreptitious darkness swelling inside him, threatening to burst like a balloon at the slightest prick. He thought Lecter was the only one that could understand, that there was something of the Other in the man seated across from him, and yet he was terrified of stripping off his skin and revealing the creature he was within.

How easy it had been, to lay a gloved hand on the heavy bust of Boruta beside his father’s bed, to send it toppling over. They said the General did not suffer in the _accident_. A pity. In the moonlight his blood looked black. His head lay shattered across the stained pillows like a constellation. And Zaharoff had reached inside the broken shell of his skull, pilfering its contents. He looked at the shiny pink curds in his palm and understood, for the first time in his life, what he was meant to do. 

Even now he could feel his father’s power singing in his veins.


	3. summer overture

His hands lit by dusty shafts of sunlight streaming through the kitchen window, Will was stubbornly hunched over at the scrubbed wood table that dominated the little room. He kept one eye on his father’s back, busying away at the stove with breakfast, the other on the battery-operated radio opened up in front of him. He liked puzzling away at things, taking them down to their minute parts and running his fingers over their edges. He was good at it. Putting everything back together, however, proved a different sort of challenge. When he found a texture he liked—a glass tube or an old dial that had tiny grooves running all around it—he’d slip it into his pocket and forget about his little projects for a time, until his father noticed something had stopped working because its parts went mysteriously missing.

And rarely did he notice. Most days the empty house sprawled around Will in thick, velvet silence, and when he wasn’t in school, he was alone with his books and fishing lures.

Absently sticking the screwdriver’s handle between his teeth, Will shut the back of the radio and pressed the power button. It crackled gently to life and brought a small smile to his face. He began idly scanning through Top 40s and fervent talk shows when a garbled sentence made his heart stop.

“ _…last week a male in his late twenties… likely murdered… body dumped at the border of—_ ”

The radio let out a sudden ugly screech of static. Will slapped both hands over his ears and almost knocked it to the linoleum.

“Can you shut that godawful thing off?”

He didn’t look up at his father, only muttered a half-hearted apology, dialed the volume down and breathlessly listened on. It was the man they had found out there, he knew it, with an inexplicable, gut-wrenching certainty. There was a bright flash of the body under the tree, shuddering, still alive—another flash, and the man’s face was upturned as Will stood over him, the dead eyes absent of light and forever unseeing. 

“ _Forensic police remained at the crime scene. Bedford County Police are still searching for suspects in connection with the discovery of… Anyone with information on the victim… encouraged to call pol—_ ”

“I said turn it off, Mina.” Will’s father looked sharply over his shoulder and jabbed a spatula at the radio.

Will inwardly cringed at the name but didn’t protest. “Look, it’s off,” he said, lifting his hands and brows defensively.

_Mina_.

At least at home that name felt safer in someone’s mouth, less like a hot brand, but it wasn’t really his name. Not anymore. It was only a reminder of the person he used to be, like flitting through old photographs of people rendered almost unrecognisable the longer you spent not looking at them, those moments of time falling out of place as the rest of the world hurtled on ahead. When he looked at his own pictures, he thought he could see the same in himself. Someone unrecognisable, with Will only beginning to emerge from beneath the sad eyes and puppy fat. The girl everyone wanted him to be. He’d been using the name Will at school for a few years now, which raised brows from time to time, eyes drifting questioningly from his face to the little bumps under his shirt, but it was close enough to his birth name that most people shrugged it off. 

Cutting all his hair off was expressly forbidden, a cruel sort of irony unknowingly laid down by his father, because Will imagined it was the one thing that would make him feel the most… _like himself_. His hair was a long mass of dark curls tangled down his back that made him feel like he had a sheep’s fleece grafted on his head. He’d been carefully snipping out locks for a long time, waging his own private war against his father. There were times he’d look down at the severed clumps of hair in his hand and feel an intense, unsettling joy bursting through him. One day, he would think, but not today.

With his hair pulled back and a hat on, his skinny body and scabby knees, he thought he looked boyish enough from the front for now.

He pushed the radio to the corner of the table just as his father began to set down chipped plates loaded with their breakfast. Overcooked sausages and scrambled eggs glistened unappetisingly at him. He was already working out in his mind how to save the sausage for Molly. Would she want any eggs, too?

“Uh, it’d be nice to have a dog,” he said out loud, remembering on late evenings the comforting warmth of Molly’s fur that diffused all the way down to his bones.

“I thought you didn't like animals,” Will’s father remarked, stirring his black coffee with the handle of his fork. The fork looked like a toy in his hand. Everything looked that tiny and delicate in his father’s grasp. He had big, leathery hands, like catcher’s gloves, the fingernails permanently dark and gritty from oil.

Will shrugged. “I don’t remember saying that. I just don’t like _people_. But I’m not asking for a person, I only said it’d be nice… you know, having a dog around.”

“Mina.”

An uncomfortable silence stretched between them, punctuated by the clinking of utensils against dishes. Will hadn’t touched a thing on his plate.

“So, family pets,” Will continued, pressing awkwardly against the silence, “Um, they say it helps teach responsibility? Something about feeding them and picking up all that crap really strengthens moral fiber, I guess.”

Even without looking up he could tell his father wasn’t smiling. Could feel his frown as easily as he felt sunlight warm on his skin.

“Well, I _know_ that’s not a problem for you. You’ve been out feeding every damn stray in the county. On my dime, too. Dog costs money, and money’s not exactly coming out of my ears.” His father spread his thick arms, indicating the house falling into disrepair around them.

“I could get a job.” The temperature seemed to drop a few degrees as soon as the words left his mouth. 

“Absolutely not. You just stick to your learning. Last thing we need is you playing hookie so you can get a paycheck.”

Will watched his father’s knife shake ever so slightly as he began to slice sausages into jagged chunks. For a moment he saw the very same serrated edge sawing into a dark, yawning wound and—He shook his head hard to dislodge the image and yet his heart continued to hammer sickly in his chest. 

Money was an ugly thing to talk about in this family. It was an ugly thing even when it wasn’t being talked about; he felt the lack of it as a permanent dull ache somewhere inside him not unlike gnawing hunger pains. The ache only grew stronger when Will was old enough to realise how wide the discrepancy between him and his peers really was. His classmates played on the sun-glinted lakes in their fancy powerboats. Will’s father just worked on them. That was the closest people like them would ever get.

“So maybe I want to play hookie. You always say I need to learn to take care of myself but you never—"

“Goddamnit.”

His father never yelled at him, never slammed doors or threw plates, never raised an oil-stained hand to him. But that single word, shot out in a harsh, frustrated whisper, made Will feel sick and dizzyingly angry. He breathed through his nose slowly and pulled his hands under the table and into his lap, rubbing the skin of his fingers together in shaky circles. Will’s father’s voice was miles away now, drowned by the buzzing static growing in his head. 

They’d never see eye-to-eye. They’d never be father and daughter. There would always be this cold tension in the room like a persistent draft, two strangers with only a genetic relationship to bind them in it. At times Will used to think that the coldness that lingered between them must have been the absence of a mother and a wife. He wasn’t sure if he just reminded his father of a woman Will never knew or if his father resented him for her not being there. But he didn’t want to scratch any deeper beneath that surface. There was no reason to; he’d been seeing enough ghosts lately.

“Do you understand, baby?” The voice floated to him distorted, as if underwater. “Look here. Look at me when I’m talking.”

Will carefully looked up into his father’s face. It leapt out at him in sharp relief: the week-old beard threaded with white hairs; little silvery scars and lines around his eyes and mouth and everywhere in-between. Someone that had spent long years eking out a living with his hands.

“I can’t… um, I can’t listen to you and look at you at the same time, right now,” Will finally murmured, running his hands against the grain under the kitchen table. “So you’re going to have to choose….”

“You can try for me, okay? I just don’t want you to waste your damn life chasing carrots like I did. Like I still do. Don’t know how to make you see that. Jesus, sometimes don’t know how to understand you at all.”

Will’s gaze shifted a little, from the permanent furrow between his father’s heavy brows down to his eyes. He didn't quite know what the plaintive expression he found there meant, but he stared and stared until his vision narrowed down to nothing but his father’s pupils shrinking in the light and spidery veins bright against sclera. The colour that reflected back at him wasn’t the same murky blue of his own eyes, like a river threaded with silt.

He cleared his throat gently, grabbed his cap off the table and jammed it on as he croaked, so quietly he could barely hear his own voice, “It’s okay. We’re nothing alike.”

*

Will’s mother had given him two things: his first name and the genes responsible for blue eyes. Or so he had gleaned. He’d never seen a photo of her, for there were none to be found in the house, but nonetheless he had a soft and hazy half-remembered image of her as lightly etched in his brain as a drawing in the sand. It could be washed away at any moment. It was a composite not of clear physical features but a clean ocean smell and warm brown skin. 

When he was younger he’d hide under the covers and whisper to her like other children unselfconsciously talked to their gods. At twelve he decided that he had never really believed in a God. Maybe he never believed in his mother either.

*

Booted and hatted, Will trudged slowly over a trampled path to the clearing. There had never been a real path through the brush before or else he would’ve found it by now, but only days before the land outside the borders of the Graham property had been crawling with police from out of town. He could still see where countless footprints had stomped the dirt and dry grass flat. Local gossip was that it was all part of some big manhunt or missing person report. An officer had even come to their door to speak with his father. Now he knew they’d been collecting evidence for a murder right in his own backyard. He looked back at his little house peeking over the vegetation, it’s wood silvered with age. Thought about the blood stain on the porch that he looked at every morning, faded to brown and flaking. The police would’ve seen it, too.

A wide berth around the gnarled oak tree had been lined off with yellow tape. There was someone on the wrong side of the line. A girl about Will’s age, with long dark hair and a red backpack slung over one shoulder, was carefully crouched over the grass around the tree’s roots. In her hand she held what looked like barbecue tongs. Puzzled, Will came closer to watch with mild interest.

She delicately picked up a clump of grass, examined it for several seconds, and then whispered to herself, “Gotcha.”

“Uhm, got _what_?” Will suddenly asked. His voice came out more accusatory and blunt than he had meant. Tone, he chastised himself, _tone_. 

Caught off-guard, the girl shrieked and, arms flailing wildly in the air in a futile attempt to balance herself, fell backward into the dirt. A fine brown cloud bloomed into the air that started her coughing and spluttering.

“Crap, I’m sorry I just….” Will rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly but didn’t move to help. He didn’t know how to finish his sentence either. He just what? Liked creeping up on people? That’s what she’d think. Most people’s first impression of Will Graham was that he was an agitated, perpetually sweaty girl.

The girl flipped over and frantically checked her tongs. Too late. Her grass sample was gone and she swore under her breath before remembering Will was still watching. “You didn’t see me here!” she hissed, ducking under the police line and staring at the scene mournfully.

Disturbed, Will said aloud, “You were _looking_ for the blood,” right as his brain made the connection. He blinked rapidly behind the thin shield of his glasses. “Well, found it, actually. Why?”

Flustered at his straightforwardness, she hurriedly shoved the tongs into her backpack. He caught a brief flash of plastic bags and tools before she zipped it up.

“Um, I’m morbidly precocious for my age?” she offered, smiling in what she must have thought was quite a disarming manner. It almost worked; Will was distracted by the dirt now streaked on her front teeth. “It’s not a crime to look, is it?”

“Isn’t crossing police lines a crime?” 

“Not if the police don’t know,” she snapped, shooting him an accusing glare that made him take half a step back. Her face softened right after, as if she quickly thought better of her hostility. “Look there’s just… some bad vibes going around. You can’t have missed it. The police were all over town last week, a body shows up near county lines. Sounds kinda fishy, right? Don’t you wanna know if there’s, I don’t know, a murderer in our midst?”

A sudden dry laugh escaped Will, surprising even himself. “You’re… serious? We’re, um, in high school, we’re not crime scene investigators. Bit out of your league, I think.”

“You know what they say, all things are possible until they’re proven _impossible_ ,” she quoted smugly. The girl had the faint air of a person that was used to being right that Will took an instant dislike to.

“Right.”

“So, uh, there’s this rumour going around that it’s this diesel mechanic that lives around here. Maybe you know him? Thomas Graham or something? Police come snooping around in his backwoods…” She touched the yellow tape with a secretive smile. “Looks like they found something.”

“That’s my dad,” Will said flatly.

“What? Oh. Oh, no. Fuck. You’re Mina Graham, aren’t you?”

He closed his eyes and smiled in a tight, humourless way. “It’s Will, actually.”

“I’m sorry, I—I think you were in my English class last year and everyone called you—well, a lot of things, which I’m not gonna repeat but—” She stopped talking and slapped her forehead. “Will. It’s Will, I get it. I’m Bev. Beverly Katz.” 

Beverly started to extend a hand and thought better of it, though she had come to stand closer to him. “Hey, I remember now. You’re Alana’s Will.”

“I’m not Alana Bloom’s _anything_ ,” Will said promptly, knitting his brows as he began to fidget with his eyeglasses.

Beverly snorted. “Tell Alana that.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Nothing. You’re just… a little different. Some people don’t mind that. I certainly don’t.” Beverly stared up at the twisted oak, the warm air stirring a dark lock of her hair against her forehead. She tucked it behind her ear and turned to smile at him. “Different isn’t always a bad thing, Will.”

The wind was rising faster now, rustling through the top of the tree and whispering through their hair. The two fell quiet, both listening intently, captivated by the eerie sounds. Will thought he could hear Beverly’s slow, rhythmic breathing. It was oddly comforting. Alive. He wondered how different Beverly, with her clear skin and pretty face and long straight hair, actually was from him. What things had happened to her to make her chase after death armed only with her red backpack.

After a moment, Beverly asked quietly, “You’re not gonna call the cops on me or anything, are you?” She watched him out of the corner of her eye. Sizing him up, no doubt.

Will shook his head. “They’d, uh, probably wonder how I knew you were here, first of all.” He let out a slow breath as he examined the crime scene. “And then they might think I was involved somehow.”

Her face split into a wide grin. The dirt was gone from her teeth. “Like you were my accomplice?”

“Um, well, you could be my accomplice for all they knew.”

The tufts of looming cloud above them seemed to only grow darker.


End file.
